Cue 'em up!

I must say, Kate Patterson would be so proud of me.

Just as I was coming home for winter break, my dad got a pretty great deal on a Netflix membership. Since I do try to be a considerate sister and girlfriend, there were many days when—instead of taking the car Em and I share or begging Cass to drive us somewhere—I stayed home with Harley dog and watched movies. Sometimes I even got a sister or two to join me. So in the past month, I’ve seen more movies than I had in the entire preceding year! Crazy stuff.

BLACK SWAN (2010)

A dark and visceral suspense film about a ballerina who cracks under the pressure of preparing for a schizophrenic lead role. Really. The film got a lot of attention because of Natalie Portman’s performance. Watching her character was like watching a car accident or a fire: I wanted to look away because it hurt to watch her, but her catastrophe was a dance of its own and it was mesmerizing. To infer from the dialogue, there may have been some moral about the dangers of obsessively chasing perfection, especially when ‘perfection’ is defined as physical beauty. After years of watching what my dancer friends go through, I had already decided that I’ll do my best to keep my kids out of dance classes if at all possible. Knowing some scary true stories made this fictional one particularly frightening for me, and I can’t say that I enjoyed watching it…but that’s why it was so good.

THE SECRET OF KELLS (2009)

How many movies are there with young monks as protagonists? I really can’t think of any. The animation in this is stunning. The whole movie is a Celtic kaleidoscope, and I’ve never seen anything like it. Of course I’m biased because I’m always going to love movies about the importance of books.

CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS (1966)

A dark Czech comedy set during WWII, this film follows the coming-of-age struggles of an apprentice dispatcher. I would really like to discuss whether the boy does or does not become a man, and why, by the end of the film. Doing so, however, would require giving away the ending. Watch it and then call me so we can talk.

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING (1988)

An American film based off a Czech book, I was actually surprised to like this as much as I did. I’m always a skeptic when it comes to “based off the book” films. Disclaimer: I haven’t read the whole book. I started it mid-semester and had to stop because my work piled up. I have all intentions to finish it though. Someday. Anyway, I really liked the movie and am curious to see which of the motifs were pulled from the book and which were emphasized by the director. There was one sequence that brilliantly stitched real footage of the ’69 invasion with cine-magined ones, changing the style of the manufactured scenes to match that of the real footage. How the producers managed to make the changes from black-and-white to color and back (with different levels of graininess and other such film tech things) without disrupting the flow of the plot is beyond me. So cool.

YOJIMBO (1961)

Cass picked this one. A warrior wanders into a town divided by two warring gangs. I really can’t comment much because I’m not familiar with the genre, but I bet you’ve heard the director’s name before. This is kindof a classic.

MAX AND MARY (2009)

A super dark claymation about a young Australian girl with her dysfunctional family, an older American man with his aspergers, and the pulse of their strange relationship. If you needed proof that claymation isn’t just a children’s medium, look no farther. Alchoholism, loneliness, suicide, abandonment...seriously, this one is troubling. And maybe inspiring in a twisted way.

EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED (2005)

Another film-based-on-the-book, except that this one isn’t at all. If you haven’t read the book by the same name, do so at once. Then you will understand what I mean when I say that the movie was pretty good because it didn’t try to be the book. It was as if someone picked a single thread of plot out of the quilted book and was content to illuminate that thread in a film adaptation. Yes, there were holes. Yes, they cut out the whole flashback. No one could do that whole book as a film and do it justice. The cast includes Elijah Wood and Eugene Hutz (of Gogol Bordello fame), and it explores culture clashes of varying types and how the stories that defined the old cultures can be buried but not banished.

THE HURT LOCKER (2008)

I had actually already seen this but watched it again. The scene in the American supermarket cereal aisle throws me every time. Why do I keep watching these intense movies?

LIFE IN A DAY (2011)

Yup. The YouTube experiment. All told, I thought it was a pretty cool multi-media collage and I’m glad someone did it. I have a huge respect for the people who put it together because I can hardly imagine how difficult sifting through all that footage was. That said, I thought that from a cinematography standpoint it was a little iffy. The segment about “What’s in your pockets” should really have been cut so it could be expanded and turned into its own mini-film. I felt like there could have been more comparative sequences (all of the people making eggs for breakfast!) and more contrasting ones (the man coming out to his grandmother and the fearful man near the end both addressing the idea of homosexuality as an illness) to tie the clips together more tightly around their theme of humanity. There were some pretty amazing stories expressed, though, and I’m glad to have seen it.